My Own Dinosaur
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When I was a boy, I dreamed of having a dinosaur named after me. Such dreams don’t come true very often. After two centuries of scientific hunting, only about eight hundred kinds of dinosaurs have been named.
An Australian girl and boy I know had the good fortune to have dinosaurs named for them. Leaellyn Rich was just two years old when she asked her parents to name a dinosaur for her. Leaellyn’s request wasn’t so unlikely. Both of her parents, Tom and Pat, are paleontologists who sometimes study dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs aren’t commonly found in Australia. But the Riches did find the fossils of a few new kinds of small dinosaurs in southern Australia.
They
called one of their discoveries Leaellynasaura,
“Leaellyn’s reptile.” And they named another
one after Leaellyn’s little brother, Tim. His dinosaur
is Timimus, meaning “Tim’s mimic.”
Dinosaur
Names
Usually, new dinosaurs are named for their special characteristics.
For example, Stegosaurus, the “roofed lizard,”
was dubbed for the plates of armor on its back.
In other cases, dinosaurs are named for the places where they were discovered. Albertosaurus was found in Alberta, Canada. Mythological characters are also popular as dinosaur names.
Body parts often figure in the last part of the name. The ending -don means “tooth” in Latin. Deinodon, “terrible tooth,” was named for its pointy teeth. That’s as close as I thought I’d ever get to a dinosaur with my name.
Another
common dinosaur ending is -saurus, which is Latin
for lizard. (Dinosaurs were once thought to be extinct lizards.)
Saura, the feminine form of saurus, has
been used in naming only a few dinosaurs. One of them is
the egg-tending Maiasaura. It was named for Maia,
who was a good mother in Greek mythology.
Most of these names have been the dinosaurs’ first,
or genus, names. Dinosaurs are not commonly named
for people. When they are, the name is usually the dinosaur’s
second, or species, name.
That’s
true for Diplodocus. Its full name is Diplodocus
carnegii, for Andrew Carnegie. He was an industrial
tycoon who took a keen interest in fossils.
Some scientists have to think of many dinosaur names because they find lots of new dinosaurs. Professor José Bonaparte of Argentina has found more than almost anyone else.
Dino
Don’s Dinosaur
In the winter of 1999 I received a package from Professor
Bonaparte. It contained a copy of Ameghiana, a
Spanish-language journal for fossil scientists. I wondered
why he had sent it to me until I read it more closely.
Professor Bonaparte had written a long and complicated article. In it, he compared the backbones of many big plant-eating dinosaurs, from primitive thirty-foot-long prosauropods to the one-hundred-foot-long sauropods that lived much later.
He had found a bone among the prosauropods that was different from all known prosauropod fossils. He had found a new kind of dinosaur.
So Professor Bonaparte gave a name to this new dinosaur—a large and primitive plant eater with a small head and a big belly: Lessemsaurus.
I was astonished and touched to find out that he had named a dinosaur after me. His article mentioned that he had named the dinosaur in honor of my fund-raising for dinosaur science, not the size of my head and stomach.
It was almost exactly my childhood dream come true, and just as exciting as I had imagined. I had wished that a giant meat eater would be named after me. But now I’m mostly a vegetarian anyway, so a plant eater seems more appropriate.
New kinds of dinosaurs are being discovered at a record rate—about one a month. We now know of twice as many kinds of dinosaurs as we did forty years ago, when I was a boy. So by the time you grow up, there will probably be at least one hundred more dinosaurs and dinosaur names. Maybe a dinosaur will be named for you: Morrisaurus, Dorisaura, or Johnadon.
Meanwhile, as I write this, I’m planning to go on a dig in Argentina. I’ll stop at the museum in the city of Tucumán to visit the bones of my dinosaur “relative.” I hope we recognize each other!
Editor’s Note: Professor Bonaparte had good reason to honor “Dino Don” Lessem. In addition to working as Dinosaur Editor for Highlights, Dino Don writes books for kids and makes exhibits and television shows—all about dinosaurs, his favorite animals. He also raises money for dinosaur research through a fund he started, the Jurassic Foundation.
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